Sea rises, and frustration too
A stoush between ratepayers and the Ka¯ piti Coast District Council coastal hazard lines continues – with accusations of shoddy science still being levelled at the council, and the mayor refusing to meet with residents.
Coastal Ratepayers United (CRU) members are frustrated that, despite being the biggest community group in the district, they have been asked not to take their concerns directly to councillors, but to a panel of 12 locals acting as community liaisons for the council’s Takutai Ka¯piti coastal adaptation project.
CRU has been a thorn in the council’s side for more than two decades; members took the council to court over a coastal hazard report, published in 2012, being used to write disclaimers of erosion risk on the LIMs of 1800 properties, lowering housing prices and making it hard to get insurance.
Despite the council winning the court case, an expert panel appointed to review the hazard lines decided they were not robust enough, and the disclaimers were removed in 2013.
The council recently published the first of two new reports by consulting firm Jacobs which will inform resilience planning for the region, at a cost of $245,000 to ratepayers.
CRU chairperson Salima Padamsey said the group thought the new report would do what the 2012 one didn’t – use ‘‘good science’’ and realistic estimates for sea level rise to inform residents of their coastal hazard risk as climate change worsens. But the group’s own scientific experts thought it had again fallen short, and requests from CRU to meet with councillors had been denied.
Ka¯ piti Mayor K Gurunathan pulled no punches in his correspondence with the group. In an email dated August 17, 2021, he wrote: ‘‘I do not wish my self informing process to be dominated by your jaundiced interpretation of reality.’’
A more recent letter, dated January 31, said: ‘‘I think it will be imprudent for me and any of the councillors to participate in your round table discussion
when we have already signed-off a formal process that will engage openly with all parties and submitters.’’
Padamsey had little confidence in the formal process. CRU was the largest ratepayer group in Ka¯piti, with members from Paeka¯ ka¯ riki to O¯ taki, she said.
‘‘We would expect that the people elected to represent us would want to know what the issues are and help bring a constructive dialogue to the process instead of turning a blind eye or shutting out their constituents.’’
Padamsey said the report had been a waste of time and money. Jacobs was contracted to do a ‘‘risk assessment’’, but what Jacobs returned was a ‘‘vulnerability study’’, which did not have the same legal clout and did
not meet the standard required to inform coastal hazard disclaimers on LIMs.
The report itself notes the inconsistency in its introduction, saying the full range of consequences and possible adaptation strategies necessary for the report to be called a ‘‘risk assessment’’ was ‘‘outside the scope of this assessment’’ – it would involve extensive community research. Therefore, it was best considered in the second, community engagement phase of the project.
Gurunathan said these gripes were ‘‘splitting hairs’’.
‘‘We signed off on a process. Given the fact that, since the last round [in] 2012, we’ve had engagement with CRU and others and ended up in court, it’s imperative that our processes are tracked, and down-pat.’’
He had called Emergency Management Minister Kiri Allan for advice on the possibility of using the latest sea level rise data – called the NZ Searise project, undertaken by scientists from GNS Science, Niwa and Victoria University – on LIMs instead.
A process needed to be established where, if followed, councils would be protected by law from any ensuing court battles, he said.